


London Burning

by SylvanWitch



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Episode Tag for 1:04, M/M, canon slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 02:57:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three days after Lisa dies (again) (forever), Ianto finds himself back at the hub. Set after 1:04, "Cyberwoman."</p>
            </blockquote>





	London Burning

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on 15 December 2008.

Three days after Lisa dies (again) (forever), Ianto finds himself back at the hub.

 

His dreams rain fire so that when he opens his eyes, he sees streamers-orange and red and an insidious sulfur yellow—and they burn.

 

Maybe it’s the salt tears.

 

He can’t sleep, can’t stay another minute with his head against the sweat-stale pillow case, the one he hasn’t changed in days, which isn’t like him.

 

Nothing’s like him since Lisa.

 

He can’t be.

 

The first time he’d lost her, the sky in London had melted, sending beautiful traces of burning death down on them, the fabric of time tearing away at the naked skin of the night, and he’d carried her in his arms.

 

When she’d breathed out, she’d screamed, took in a scorched breath, screamed again, until her voice was a raw ruin and still she had wheezed away in agony.

 

But he had carried her, would always have carried her.  There were no limits to his portage.  

 

Look at the way he’d carried the secret of her, buried deep in the bowels of the building, though ice ran through his own belly whenever Jack looked at him like his captain knew something.

 

Ianto had learned quickly that the limits of what Jack knew were demarcated by the lines his captain drew in conversation.  There were simply things one did not ask.  Things Jack expected never to hear.

 

And Ianto would have kept those lines firmly between them if he’d been able to sleep.

 

Cardiff smelled different than London, and though it had been months, he still wasn’t used to it, the way the damp sea air stayed at the bottom of his lungs, the way he tasted it on the back of his tongue with every inhalation.  It was like the ocean here was somehow older, less interested in placating the city on its shore.  It slept fitfully and carried stories on its breath, and Ianto didn’t like it.

 

He didn’t like the water tower much, either, which surprised him.  Usually, clean and classic lines attracted him, but there was something so pointedly Other about the tower that he couldn’t help but find it pretentious.

 

Now, the way its silver gathered light, spooling it and spilling down its sleek sides reminded him far too much of the way the organic and the mechanical could mesh.  

 

He shrugged deeper into his coat, hands in his pockets, head down against the sight of it, of what it did to him, tightening his breath to the bone, until he came to his usual entrance, to the station that he kept against outsiders or any who would seek sanctuary, knowingly or otherwise, in the strangeness of Torchwood’s world.

 

Always, he paused at the threshold between behind and before the counter, in the liminal space made by becoming and being.

 

He could choose to never cross the line again, cease answering the phone or making coffee, could stop being the porter at the gates of this particular hell.

 

But then, he’d never see Jack again, and that was a thought he couldn’t bear, though carrying it right now was the hardest part of breathing.

 

The day before Lisa died, Jack had kissed him for the first time and Ianto had let him.

 

He could tell himself he’d been starved for touch, for human contact, slaving so long over the still and half-frozen flesh of his lover until he thought he, too, had been soldered into metal, all his best parts made cold and unmoving against life.

 

But the truth was, since the night he’d saved Jack from the pterodactyl—since Jack had saved him from the nightmare fires of his dreams—he’d known there would be a day when he’d betray Lisa. 

 

How could anyone be expected to stand against a man like Jack and not want?

 

Even Owen, who had no sense about him of that kind of love—even Owen wanted Jack, though in a different, unfleshed way.

 

And so here he was.  He wanted to roll the stone back, stride up to this undying man who was supposed to save their world, and hit Jack hard enough that he would finally die a true death and never rise.

 

But he had no strength.

 

The floor where she’d died was still stained, though Ianto himself had scrubbed until his hands inside the vinyl gloves were slick with sweat, until blisters broke out above the cuff of the gloves, where the caustic cleaner had eaten away at him until he’d added his blood to hers.  

 

His steps sounded wetter over those phantom places where she’d been.  In his mind, he saw her DNA twining blue up a computer screen, imagined Tosh recreating Lisa, Owen’s deft hands making her out of nothing, out of one of Ianto’s ribs, perhaps, or the shriveled flesh left beneath them, beating but bereft.

 

Underground at night, the shadows moved less fluidly.  They seemed so much a part of the dusky half-light, underlit by anemic screens, numbers fleeing across them.  Still, he knew Jack was watching him, could feel the weight of his regard.

 

He took his hands out of his pockets and hung his jacket haphazardly over the back of a swivel chair.

 

Moved toward the metal stairs undoing his cuffs, loosening his tie.

 

Though he was ridden by nightmares and unable to take a full breath, he’d still put on a fresh shirt, a pressed suit.  The suit was all that was left of him, after all, so much shell to fossilize and provide future wonder for alien children to ponder.

 

He didn’t meet Jack’s eyes, didn’t so much as look at his leader, just kept walking, undoing his shirt now, letting it fall behind him until he was down to the clean white undershirt.

 

Then he stopped, but still he didn’t turn, didn’t take in his captain’s expression, didn’t recognize anything except the way the place still felt inhabited by her.

 

Before, when she’d slept in the cellar, he’d imagined he could feel her heart beating through the floor.  He knew it was just the hum of the place, its strange energy shifting above the rift, but he’d found comfort in thinking that they were somehow always connected.

 

Now, though the pulse still thrummed through the soles of his feet, he felt nothing.  

 

Empty space, maybe, with room enough for hate and blame, if he was economical with it, if he stacked it just so.

 

He was in Jack’s office waiting when the man himself came through the door wearing what passed most times for his “concerned” look.

 

Ianto took care of that with a single, sharp right, a jab really, nothing with much effort.  He found now that they’d come to it, he didn’t have the energy even for annihilation.

 

Maybe he could freeze himself on the outside, too, be recovered—he can’t say revived, since that implies life, after all—when someone else was in charge of the end of the world.

 

Jack shakes off the sting of it, lip already swelling, blood at one corner.

 

“Is that why you came here?”  

 

Ianto wonders if it’s physiologically impossible for Jack to say things like that without it sounding like an invitation to fuck.  He doesn’t respond.

 

Jack regards him and then gives him his back, takes a turn around the desk, settles in his usual seat, feet up, arms behind his head, all that broad spread of chest wide open like a playground taunt.

 

“Did you kill her so you could have me?”

 

He doesn’t inflect.  Emphasis requires energy.  

 

Jack’s face echoes Ianto’s tone, and for a long minute, there is the kind of silence that presages catastrophe.

 

Then.

 

“What do you want me to say?”

 

Not “No” nor “Yes.”  

 

Not a scoffing laugh or scornful silence.

 

Ianto hates Jack for giving him a choice.  He doesn’t have the volition left to make one, and in either case, he’s damned.

 

If Jack killed Lisa to have Ianto, Ianto can never allow Jack to have him.

 

And if Jack killed her because she was a real threat, then Ianto has to accept that he carried her too far, that he should have left her to burn with the sky that night and with all the others, the ones whose screams he passed by as he raced to her side.

 

Suddenly, the room smells of burning metal and charred flesh and he gags.

 

Nothing comes up.  There’s nothing in him but howling space.

 

Jack is up and at his side before Ianto can wipe the reflexive tears from his eyes.  His captain’s hand does it for him, and Jack’s wet palm is hot as it slides down his jaw to rest against his neck.

 

When he swallows, he feels his apple bob against that heat.  

 

He daren’t look into Jack’s face.  He can’t stand to see himself lining up behind everyone else the eons have put beneath Jack’s hands.

 

The oblivion of multitudes seems preferable, anyway.

 

But.

 

“What do you know of love?  We love to fight back death, but you can’t die.”

 

“I’ve kept vigil, Ianto.”

 

And it’s such an oddly formal thing to say, quaint even, pretentious in exactly the opposite way as the accursed tower that rises like accusation not far from where they stand, pointing heavenward to babble at the stars and swear there is no god.

 

He wrenches himself away from Jack and shoves him with both hands, hard up against the desk, following into the man’s space before he can recover his balance and pressing in to bend Jack backwards, to pinion him on the pivot point of one sharp knee.

 

Jack cranes to look into Ianto’s face across the distance of his chest, which rises and falls, the ubiquitous blue shirt like a banner fluttering where his pulse point beats against the braces.

 

“For once in your goddamned life, say something that’s true,” Ianto suggests, barely a whisper of the rage that burns inside of him, fueled by fires he never really escaped, never mind that he carried the weight of his love in his blistering arms.  

 

His voice is dry like he’s been screaming into the smoke.  It wheezes when he wants it to bellow.

 

“I killed her because it was my job.  And because you couldn’t do yours.”

 

And all at once, Ianto is standing too close and he can feel something coming out of him, something ripping its way up his throat, and he doesn’t understand it until he hears it, as though every weevil in the basement cells is shrieking.

 

The glass at his back vibrates with the force of his coming against it, and this time it’s he who is pressed back, who has to crane his neck upward to look into the face of the other.

 

Jack’s wide palm is warm and wet against his neck again, his lips warm, too, when they touch his, gathering the moisture and stopping the sound.

 

He can’t hear anything then except Jack’s breath against his ear when he finally pulls back to say, “Let me,” and does not wait for Ianto’s reply.

 

Damp hands pull his tee shirt from his trousers, undo his belt, button, zipper without a pause for breath, the voice still whispering, “Let me,” like a litany into his ear, which is filled suddenly with the rush of his own blood, taking on the life of the building that thrums up through the floor.

 

He has to close his eyes against the vertigo of anticipation, and then throws them wide when he feels Jack’s broad palm pressing tear-wet fingers against his naked belly.

 

He lets out a sobbing breath and the force of it moves Jack’s little finger against the wiry fringe of his hair.  Ianto chokes on a sound that might have been a word, and Jack slides his hand a scant inch, then two.

 

Ianto’s view narrows and sharpens.  He notices the way Jack’s sleeve rides up around the wrist device he always wears, the way the hair there curls away from the restricting fabric, the way the muscles leading to his thumb flex as he moves his hand along Ianto’s hard flesh.  

 

Jack’s hands are fine for their size; a wide blue vein runs like a river down from his wrist to his fingers, branching at the knuckles, scarred from so much violent use.

 

As though he senses he’s lost the entirety of Ianto’s focus, Jack roughens his grip, and Ianto throws his head back hard enough to hear a hollow reverberation against the glass.  Pain radiates out from the point, and Jack tightens his grip still more.

 

He hisses and bucks, coming in a hot arc against his captain’s hand even as Jack eats the sounds of sobbing pleasure from Ianto’s mouth.

 

When he comes back to the world, Jack is kneeling on the floor between his spread legs, bracketing his face in two strong, still damp hands.  A draft at his belly tells him he’s still undone.

 

Undone entirely.

 

He recovers enough to search out the root of Jack’s need with his eyes and is surprised to find a spreading darkness against his captain’s trousers.

 

Jack’s hands tighten on his face, and he looks up.

 

His lip is bleeding still, a sluggish little stream, and Ianto thinks it must be madness that he can actually taste metal on his tongue.  He runs the tip of it over his lips, though, and lets the taste settle in his throat, watching as his captain’s eyes follow the movement.

 

“You don’t love me.”

 

Like he’s establishing the terms of their new contract.  Like the sticky memory of their pleasure isn’t drying in the cool air, making him itch.

 

“I could.”

 

Ianto looks then—really looks—at Jack.  He wants to hear a lie in his captain’s voice, wants to hear words that Jack has said a thousand times so that he can choose not to believe them.  So that he can say he made this choice, at least.

 

But he sees in Jack’s eyes only an ancient isolation, loneliness that dwarfs his own small pain, a self-perpetuated penance against some sin Jack never names.

 

Ianto nods, feeling his tear-damp skin sliding in the parentheses of Jack’s palms.

 

“We should shower,” he says, struggling to free himself of Jack’s grasp so that he can stand and start to clean them up, get them back into a shape worthy of work.

 

Jack stands easily, with that grace of ages, and offers Ianto a hand, which he does not relinquish once Ianto is again on his feet.

 

Instead, Jack brings it to his lips and leaves a warm kiss on his ring finger.

 

“I could,” he says again.

 

Ianto chooses to believe him.

 

 


End file.
